Stabs-in-the-back in Vietnam and Afghanistan?

Fred Kaplan a couple of weeks ago look at the ongoing politics of the Afghanistan exit. In The Afghanistan Blame Game Has Begun in the Senate Slate 09/28/2021. He records a moment especially worth remembering:

Not quite one month after the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan, we are now entering the phase when our politicians ask, “Who’s to blame?”

It officially began on Tuesday, when the top three officials responsible for the war—Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin; Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of Central Command—appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. One of the most remarkable things about the hearing was that all three admitted that there’s something worth blaming someone for — that the 20-year war, the longest in our history, was a rout. Or, as both generals put it in more delicate but still damning terms, a “strategic failure.” [my emphasis]

After Vietnam, the military and the war fans among the foreign policy establishment established a stab-in-the-back theory of the Vienam War, in which the Pentagon did nothing but win, but the gutless politicians back home. At that time (1974), Gerald Ford was President and Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State, and they consciously set up a stab-in-the-back theory to blame Democratic war critics. (See my post More skepticism on Healer-in-Chief Jerry Ford 12/29/2006.

John Prados in his excellent book Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975 (2009) includes these observations:

To this day, war defenders and neo-orthodox historians have been unable to propose a convincing argument for how the Vietnam war could have been won. ...

... some of the defenders and the neo-orthodox have resorted to the proposition that the United States did win in Vietnam. Aside from the fact that Hanoi's troops ended the conflict by marching into Saigon, and not the other way around, this claim ignores a plethora of evidence. In explaining the actual outcome, proponents are forced into a stab-in-the-back argument: Congress lost the war, the Movement lost the war, the press, or whatever. These explanations trivialize historical forces: the social, political, and economic dynamics at work in Vietnam, the United States, and the world. They also distort the political and military events that defined its actual course. The atomization of the history of the war has, until now, made trivialization and distortion easier. Triumph was not forsaken in Vietnam, nor victory lost; there was no day that the war was won, except for Hanoi on April 29, 1975, when its troops marched into Saigon. [my emphasis in bold]

I'll also note here the judgment made by Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense 1961-1968 and one of the chief US decision-makers in the Vietnam War, in a 1999 book, Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy:

At no time, beginning with the increase of U.S. military advisers early in the Kennedy administration to the final withdrawal of American troops during the Nixon administration, would it have been possible at acceptable cost-in terms of American and Vietnamese lives lost and without the risk of war with China and/or Russia-to achieve a military victory in Vietnam. From 1964 forward, there did not exist an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam with the ability to provide services and security to the rural population of South Vietnam to thereby win over its loyalty. To put it bluntly, America's efforts to substitute for South Vietnam's government and army through force of arms were doomed to failure from the very beginning. Both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson at some point in the decisionmaking [sic] process stated that they would not send American boys to do what South Vietnamese boys should be doing. But for various reasons, and on the advice of their senior advisers, they did exactly that. And this nation found out, tragically, that 525,000 American soldiers - however courageous, however well-trained, -equipped, and -supplied - were not the answer to South Vietnam's political problems; the civil war - the Vietnamese "people's war" could not be won by any external military force, no matter how powerful. From 1964 to 1973, the so-called Republic of Vietnam, that is, what we came to know as "South Vietnam," existed only because ot the willingness of the United States to send soldiers to fight on its behalf. When U.S. support was removed, the inevitable results could have been predicted, whether in 1964, 1968, or l973. [my emphasis]

As Kaplan makes clear, the embryonic Afghanistan stab-in-the-back narrative is at least as cynical as the Vietnam War one.

In a column the following day, Kaplan expands on this analysis (We Now Know Why Biden Was in a Hurry to Exit Afghanistan Slate 09/28/2021):

Milley and Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the head of Central Command, both acknowledged at the hearing that the U.S. military was flying blind through much of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history. The officers of the day tried to mold the Afghan army in their own image, making them too dependent on U.S. technology and support, so that once we withdrew, collapse was inevitable. Milley also noted that he and the other officers paid too little attention to Afghan culture and to the corrosive effects of the Afghan government’s corruption and lack of popular legitimacy. So, Biden might well have been thinking, why should he pay attention to anything these guys had to say on the war in Afghanistan, which they’ve been wrong about from the very beginning?

Biden made several missteps, some of them disastrous, in the pace and sequence of the withdrawal. Most of all, he should have pulled out all the spies, contractors, U.S. citizens, and Afghan helpers before pulling out all the troops. But on the big picture, he was right, and the generals, as they now grudgingly admit, were wrong. [my emphasis]

This is not to say that the US can never win these kinds of "small wars." The US did stop North Korea from taking over South Korea, for instance. It does say that the US needs to do a better job on assessing the real national interests, the strength of the expected opposition, and the particularities of the international situation in these situations.

NATO, the US, and exit from Afghanistan

Stephen Walt calls attention to an article that looks at some merdy detail that aren't necessarily relevant to the current politics of the failure of the Afghanistan War but are important in the historical record: Sara Bjerg Moller, Five Myths About NATO and Afghanistan Lawfare 09/05/2021.

Sara Moller punctures myths re NATO &#Afghanistan: "European politicians now feigning shock at the U.S. withdrawal timeline (or opposition to it) have about as much credibility as Captain Renault did upon discovering gambling in Rick’s Café Américain." https://t.co/rieRxumi3o

— Stephen Walt (@stephenWalt) September 5, 2021

Walt is referring to one of her points about an endless phenomenon, the jockeying between the US and European allies over how the alliance should work and who is pulling their weight and who not. In the current moment, people who are skeptical of NATO military interventions have an obvious reason to be calling attention to the sad outcome of the Afghanistan War. (Aside from the fact that it was obviously a disaster.) And people who want to see European military capacities built up also have an incentive to point to American deficiencies in Afghanistan - including sloppy claims about the withdrawal - in order to promote their point. Politics is politics, after all.

Moller explains on the last point:

Several commentators as well as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair have accused the U.S. government of leaving “European countries in the lurch” as it went about the late-summer withdrawal. Some European politicians have even gone so far as to claim that they were opposed all along to the U.S. withdrawal timetable and spoke out against it during meetings with U.S. government officials earlier this year. But neither claim passes muster.

For starters, there was nothing hasty or precipitous about the U.S. withdrawal timeline, which had been in the works since the February 2020 Doha agreement. Second, President Biden announced in early April 2021 his administration’s plans to complete America’s military exit from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Third, NATO allies were briefed on the plans at a joint meeting of foreign and defense ministers on April 14 of this year by none other than Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin themselves. [my emphasis]

It seems obvious to me that better European defense coordination in the context of the European Union would be a good thing. Not least because it might bring a little more practical realism to issues like French military intervention in the African Sahel.

Moller makes four other points, none of them quite so relevant to the politics of the moment. One is about the historic invocation of the NATO alliance's collective defense clause:

It is true that NATO invoked Article V—which stipulates that an armed attack against one or more members “shall be considered an attack against them all” and entreats allies to take “such actions” as they deem necessary—in the aftermath of al-Qaeda’s attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. But neither of the two missions the transatlantic alliance undertook in Afghanistan—the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Resolute Support—were Article V missions. Those now claiming that, by leaving Afghanistan, the United States is not only abandoning Afghans but also jeopardizing European allies’ confidence in U.S. security guarantees are either unaware of — or worse, deliberately rewriting — history.

It is still accurate to describe the Afghanistan War as a US-NATO intervention, or a US-led NATO intervention, or a US-led intervention. But the precedents on treaties can be important. The neocon and general unilateral nationalists of the Cheney-Bush Administration viewed NATO as more of a hindrance and annoyance in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks than as an asset. They were more worried about European allies constraining US action than magnifying it. She explains, "it was not until Oct. 4, 2001, that the North Atlantic Council formally invoked Article V, paving the way for NATO allies to send Airborne Early Warning and Control Force aircraft (AWACs) to patrol U.S. skies and offer other assistance, such as intelligence sharing, to Washington." (my emphasis)

The two major "NATO-led" operations in Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF, originally formally authorized by the UN) and the subsequent Resolute Support Mission. Neither was legally considered an Article V action under the NATO treaty.

Another of her five points argues that the US-NATO mission is Afghanistan was not a "national-building" effort. This is the only one of the five where I think she might be splitting the hairs a bit too closely. As she writes, "there is no internationally agreed upon legal definition of nation-building, evidence for what constitutes nation-building is often in the eye of the beholder." But the public diplomacy of the Cheney-Bush, Obama-Biden, and Trump-Pence Administrations presented the US effort there as defending democratic governance, the rule of law, democracy, and human rights (especially women's rights). The US did stand up a pro-US, pro-India government in late 2001 based on the former Northern Alliance rebels that stayed in place until last month. For the future, it's important to understand both how the national-building aspect failed as well as what a fraud the claims around "nation building" were. How that government figured into the strategic rivalry between Pakistan and India is a key reason it fell.

Another of her points addresses the argument that, well, some NATO allies could have left troops in Afghanistan after the US withdraw. Oh, please. As she notes, "it was neither politically nor militarily feasible for any NATO ally, either on its own or in combination with others, to maintain any kind of mission in Afghanistan after the U.S. departure."

Finally, she dismisses the argument that pulling out of Afghanistan would undermine European allies' confidence in the US commitment to the NATO alliance. "If anything, America’s treaty allies should take comfort from the fact that Washington is finally shedding a costly military misadventure and choosing instead to focus on addressing contemporary challenges facing the alliance, like Russia and China."

Trump's America First militarism - now that is a threat to European confidence in the US commitment to NATO. But not exiting from a clearly failed intervention in a country that does not represent vital interests of the US or its European allies.

Afghanistan and air war

Fred Kaplan provides an important reminder that war by aerial drones is still war, Sunday’s Drone Strike Disaster Shows the Risks of Biden’s Afghanistan Strategy Slate 08/31/2021

Usually, in planning air strikes, including remotely controlled drone strikes, myriad sources of intelligence are integrated into as complete a picture as possible — images from satellites and spy planes, views from the pilot in the plane firing the missile (if it’s overhead), and communications intercepts. But it’s best if all this data can be matched by intelligence on the ground — sources who can confirm that the target actually is who the commanders think he is, spotters who can specify and track his location, and others who can go see whether the bomb killed the right people (or destroyed the right object) and didn’t damage the wrong ones.

There are always refinements in military technology. But all versions of aerial bombing kill civilian noncombatants. Obviously, a missile or bomb that strikes an enemy warship or tactical air support in an open military clash could constitute exceptions.

But when we are talking about "strtegic bombing" aimed at military factories and power grids or targeted-assassination type bombing attcks kill civilians. Lots of them. Everyone, from reporters to the public and Members of Congress should always remember what's behind terms like "surgical strike" in wars.

Neta Crawford looks at estimates of war costs for the failed US war in Afghanistan: Calculating the costs of the Afghanistan War in lives, dollars and years Infotmed Comment 09/02/2021: "The war in Afghanistan, like many other wars before it, began with optimistic assessments of a quick victory and the promise to rebuild at war’s end. Despite Bush’s warning of a lengthy campaign, few thought then that would mean decades. But 20 years later, the U.S is still counting the costs."

Congress and the public really need to know some basic facts about how the government is approaching the ongoing anti-terrirism military action, whether the government labels them "war on terror" or not: Tara Copp, ‘It’s Possible’ US and Taliban Will Target ISIS-K Together, Milley Says Defense One 09/01/2021.

Leaving Afghanistan: With one more drone strike producing civilian casualties

This is a very good segment, presented in two parts in these videos below, from Cenk Uygar and Ana Kasparian of TYT (August 30 show) on the US drone strike in Afghanistan Monday that killed several civilians. (Afghanistan: US investigates civilian deaths in Kabul strike BBC News 08/30/2021)

The first segment does a good job of putting the reports about civilian "collateral damage," i.e., noncombatants killed in US military operations, into thze context of how difficult it is for the US to win over local populations in guerilla wars like that in Afghanistan. U.S. Drone Strike Kills Multiple Civilians In Kabul:

Making imagine-if-it-happened-to-us points can be tricky. But they do a good job of it in that segment. If the police in an American city took an action against someone they considered dangerous and numerous civilians including small children was killed, the media would be asking lots of questions and highlighting the distress of the survivors.

In the following segment, they stress the importance of pressing the Biden-Harris Administration for much more transparency about what their counterterrorism strategy is for Afghanistan going forward. Are they intending to keep up drone strikes based somewhere outside the country against ISIS-K, which both the Taliban and their Pakistan allies consider enemies? Would such strikes only be in retaliation against attacks on Americans? Will they cooperate with the Taliban government in Afghanistan on those strikes, which to some extent would make the US a military ally of the Taliban? Will the US supply clandestine aid to groups opposing the Taliban government, one of the most significant of those groups at the moment being ISIS-K?

U.S. Military SILENT on Future Forever Wars:

I try to avoid quoting recovering Republican neocon Jennifer Rubin, who has become a favorite of many Democrats. But I'm making an exception here for her column, Biden tells some hard truths few want to hear Washington Post 08/29/2021. She gives a talking-points-style refutation of many Republican and mainstream-media takes aimed at prolonging US participation in the Afghanistan forever war. She won't get an criticism from me on this point, for instance: "We need some sober reflection on the folly of overeager interventionism."

Defeats in war are always a good time to whack leftwing strawmen for things they aren't saying

I came across this article by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale in a polemic to which I'll say more below. It's from a left-leaning site called Anne Bonny Pirate, Afghanistan: The End of the Occupation 08/17/2021. (The site is named after a famous 18th century female pirate.) A German version appears on a site called Marx21 (whose namesake is pretty obvious), Rückkehr der Taliban - Das Ende der Besatzung 08/18/2021. (For what it's worth, the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung regards the adherents of Marx21 as an "extremist group.")

Lindisfarne and Neale draw the following six lessons from the current state of the Afghanistan War:

First, the Taliban have defeated the United States.

This is true. There is a larger international context, of course. The Taliban receives critical support from Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. And though the US carried the lead, the US operation was actually officially a NATO mission, and other NATO countries including German did take part in combat operations. But the basic point is correct: The Taliban defeated the US.

Second, the Taliban have won because they have more popular support.

Also true. Lindisfarne and Neale expand on this point: "The fact that more people have chosen the Taliban does not mean that most Afghans necessarily support the Taliban. It means that given the limited choices available, that is the choice they have made. " They are not claiming that this was some kind of peaceful transition based on free and competitive elections.

Third, this is not because most Afghans love the Taliban. It is because the American occupation has been unbearably cruel and corrupt.

Yes, the occupation was in practice "cruel and corrupt." But it was also a foreign occupation. Even if the local loyalties are more ethnic and religious (or "tribal" to use the dated word we still hear a lot) than what we usually think of a "national" loyalty, they were locals. The NATO countries dropping bombs, blasting people with drone strikes, and knocking down doors in search of "terrorists" were foreigners. This is important. Those nationalist sentiments are very much connected to the particulars of the politics. But it also matters in itself.

History never repeats itself exactly, of course. But there is a history that earned Afghanistan the nickname "graveyard of empires." That history includes events like the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839-1842. Also the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1879. And the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919.

Fourth, the War on Terror has also been politically defeated in the United States. The majority of Americans are now in favor of withdrawal from Afghanistan and against any more foreign wars.

And that's been the case for years. Unlike the US foreign policy establishment, the public has wanted the US to pull out of Afghanistan for a long time. And that's true, even though the bizarrely negative current US media coverage of the withdrawal may have some short-term effect in the polls.

Fifth, this is a turning point in world history. The greatest military power in the world has been defeated by the people of a small, desperately poor country. This will weaken the power of the American empire all over the world.

While technically true - in the international context mentioned above - it's unclear in what way it will "weaken the power of the American empire." As Stephen Walt noted on Twitter:

What it may have damaged is confidence in US foreign policy judgment and competence, but that process began a long time ago.

— Stephen Walt (@stephenWalt) August 16, 2021

Sixth, the rhetoric of saving Afghan women has been widely used to justify the occupation, and many feminists in Afghanistan have chosen the side of the occupation. The result is a tragedy for feminism.

This two-sentence point is a big generalization about an obviously very complicated problem. But they do expand on this as on all the other points at greater length in the article. Lindisfarne actually did anthropological research in northern Afghanistan, which she reported (as Nancy Tapper) in the book, Bartered Brides: Politics and Marriage in a Tribal Society (1991). So they aren't just shooting from the hip on this point. She argues that since both the Soviet and American interventions made women's rights a prominent policy and justification for their military actions.

It's also the case that nobody anywhere judges a particular regime, or its foreign allies who may be bombing and running drone strikes in support of them. They write:

How do you think most Afghan women feel about another invasion, this time by the Americans, justified by the need to rescue Afghan women? Remember, those statistics about the dead, the maimed and the refugees under Soviet occupation were not abstract numbers. They were living women, and their sons and daughters, husbands, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers.

How much those Afghans who identified themselves as feminists in some sense - presumably most human rights activists and professional women like judges did so in some way or other - were particularly identified by the general population with the bombing and drone strikes, I don't know. But it is clear that the current situation is not only a "tragedy for feminists" but a tragedy for Afghan women and girls, as well.

This is a continuing risk in the politics and practice of "humanitarian intervention." In Iraq, there was a broad recognition that however dictatorial and evil Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq was, women in Iraq had as much or more legal and practical equality than any other Arab country. That doesn't justify crimes on Saddam's part. Nor does it mean that Iraqi women were wrong to oppose Saddam's regime. But the US invasion clearly empowered an Islamist-oriented politics in Iraq that is not particularly enthusiastic about gender equality. War is complicated business. Including imperial and neo-imperial wars. Bombing and drone strikes kill women as well as men and children.

Are critics of the Afghanistan War romanticizing reactionary Islamist politics?

Going back to Stephen Walt's point, the US did not have a pressing and immediate, aka, "vital" interest in keeping the pro-American and pro-India government last headed by President Ashraf Ghani in power via a military conflict with direct US participation. It's a very practical point of which we shouldn't lose sight. The Taliban, decisively aided by the Pakistani ISI, has won a victory against an America operating without a vital US interest at stake.

I came across the Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale through an article criticizing it by Moheb Shafaqyar, an Afghan immigrant to Germany associated with the German Left Party (DIE LINKE), Das Ende der Besatzung Der Freitag 24.08.2021. Shafaqyar singles out their article for criticism on the grounds that it romanticizes the Taliban.

I'm sure there are plenty of nuances in German Left Party debates about foreign policy that I don't understand. (The national party co-chair Janine Wissler was at least until recently associated with the Marx21 group.) But I don't see the alleged romanticization he criticizes. In fact, he seem to be resorting to oppo-research type arguments to make his case. This argument, for instance, is not only refuting something that Lindisfarne and Neale did not say but is also pretty much indistinguishable from stock neocon arguments against anyone criticizing a foolish military intervention:

This idea [of a socialist-led Islamist movement] and the resulting narrative of an oppressed class that has just been able to defeat imperialism leads to this narrative: The Taliban actually just have the wrong ideology, but a victory against imperialism and thus against one of the most aggressive forms of capitalism is still a victory – and therefore somehow edifying. Raise a fist, or, as I had to read in a comment column discussion among people in a not unimportant position of left-wing organizations: Toast to it first! For revolutionaries in Europe and America, the young people falling out of the planes are above all images on screens, so they are quickly hidden. After all, when was the last time people in this country raised their glass of Lambrusco to toast the overthrow of an order? [my emphasis]

This could have come from Butcher's Bill Kristol or Dick Cheney's favoirte historian Victor Davis Hanson.  Is This really how pro-intervention people in the German Left Party make their arguments? Lindisfarne and Neale do make the point that the Taliban was able to win the support they did among poor Afghans (and there are lots of poor Afghans!) by being a domestic force fighting against a foreign invader who capitalized on the abuses of the NATO-backed government:

[A]ny movement that has fought a twenty-year guerrilla war and defeated a great empire is anti-imperialist, or words have no meaning.

Reality is what it is. The Taliban are a movement of poor peasants, against an imperial occupation, deeply misogynist, supported by many women, sometimes racist and sectarian, and sometimes not. That’s a bundle of contradictions produced by history.

Another source of confusion is the class politics of the Taliban. How can they be on the side of the poor, as they obviously are, and yet so bitterly opposed to socialism? The answer is that the experience of the Russian occupation stripped away the possibility of socialist formulations about class. But it did not change the reality of class. No one has ever built a mass movement among poor peasants that took power without being seen as on the side of the poor.

The Taliban talk not in the language of class, but in the language of justice and corruption. ...

None of this means that the Taliban will necessarily rule in the interests of the poor. We have seen enough peasant revolts come to power in the last century and more, only to become governments by urban elites. And none of this should distract from the truth that the Taliban intend to be dictators, not democrats. [my emphasis]

I guess if any mention of "anti-imperialist" is taken as a marker of leftwing ditzyness, Shafaqyar's argument makes some sense. He also oddly complains that Lindisfarne and Neale's position is "starkly dominated by geopolitics." Say what? A 20-year war in Asia by the United States and its European allies as part of a "global war on terror" is, you know, a geopolitical event. What would be a non-geopolitical way to think of that war? Calling it a purely "tribal" conflict with no broader international significance?

Lindisfarne and Neale's article may appear on a website called Marx21. But there is nothing in it about some ideal of socialist-led Islamist movements. Nor any mention of capitalism, for that matter. I "ellipsed" these two comments out of their quote just given: "[The Taliban] themselves, or their parents or grandparents, were killed and tortured by socialists and communists [during the period of the pro-Soviet government]." "[T]he experience of the Russian occupation stripped away the possibility of socialist formulations about class."

Isolde Charim in the Vienna weekly Falter has a good summary of the war's immediate outcome (although it admittedly may also suffer from a "geopolitical" perspective):

Twenty years of US presence in Afghanistan have not been enough to fight terrorism, nor to build a democratic state and enforce (or, what, “plant”?) democratic principles. Twenty years have not been enough for the acceptance of human rights. Human rights are considered blasphemous by the Taliban. [Here she inserts a sarcastic dig at a statement by Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer that implied it was unacceptable for Austria to be restrained by human rights law in its treatment of refugees.]

Twenty years have also not been enough to implement women's rights in society. What about Zarifa Ghafari, the first Afghan mayor of a city near Kabul? From a Western point of view, her appointment was a step forward, an achievement of equality. For her, however, the social non-acceptance of a female politician was life-threatening from the very beginning. She has since fled Afghanistan. [my translation]

I think I'll stick with the more pragmatic-oriented, practical "geopolitical" view of the Afghanistan War.

• Zarifa Ghafari talks about local tolerance and support for the Taliban in They never took stand against terrorism: Afghan mayor Zarifa Ghafari blames locals for Taliban takeover India Today 08/25/2021. She successfully fled Afghanistan and is now in Germany. (Frauenrechtlerin Ghafari ist in Deutschland Deutsche Welle 23.08.2021; Joseph Nasr, Former Afghan mayor pledges to fight for women's rights in exile Reuters 08/24/2021)
• Bruce Riedel discusses the Taliban and Pakistan in Pakistan’s problematic victory in Afghanistan Brookings Institute 08/24/2021. "Pakistan’s army Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) has backed the Taliban since the group’s origin in the mid-1990s. ... Pakistan provided experts and advisers for the Taliban military, oil for its economy and was their supply route to the outside world."
• The Left Party voted in the German Parliament for the limited German evacuation mission currently underway in Afghanistan. (Jana Frielinghaus, Auch Linke für Mission der Luftwaffe in Kabul Neues Deutschland 25.08.2021)

The Beltway media sputters in outrage at Biden exiting the forever war in Afghanistan

Is there a word for bad nostalgia? Because the US media response to the end of 20 years of an Afghanistan policy that was effectively doomed from the get-go is making me think of the same media's performance in the lead-up to the Iran War.

My feeling is kind of like Stephen Crowder instantly iconic response to Sam Seder showing up unexpectedly on his show (Oh No! Sam Seder! What A Nightmare! 06/23/2021):

Eric Alterman unloads on the subject in How Low Can They Go? The Media’s Afghan Coverage The American Prospect 08/20/2021 harshes on the US coverage of the withdrawal, in this article with several helpful links:

The most obvious among the myriad failures of mainstream coverage of the crisis is its stubborn ahistoricism. The Biden administration may have screwed up the exit of U.S. troops and the friendly Afghans who helped them, but hey, this was a 20-year, nearly $2.4 trillion war effort that was built on lies and self-delusion and that we didn’t really want to win in the first place.

Josh Marshall also has some salty comments in The Fall of Kabul, Washington and the Guys at the Fancy Magazines TPM 08/20/2021:

Like hyenas and chimpanzees, reporters hunt in packs. There’s a reason they call them ‘feeding frenzies’. They’re also obsessed with images. But none of that is unique to the current situation. There’s something more at work here. ....

From the beginning of this twenty years there has been a tendency among intellectuals to cast America’s response to the 9/11 attacks and Islamist fanaticism in grand world historical terms.

Although Josh doesn't use the term American Exceptionalism, the attitude he describes among many reporters and their favorite establishment sources is a form of it. More specifically, he thinks after the heady days two decades ago when the Global War on Terror (even the acronym GWOT was common for a while):

... lingering long after has been the idea that the US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan were latter day analogues to America’s conquests, occupations and decades long military and diplomatic commitments in Asia and Europe which still form the cornerstones of US military and diplomatic strategies in the world. They were simply ones that contemporary America lacked the fortitude, commitment or character to see through.

This was simply never true. They were altogether different. These were far tawdrier affairs, a tawdriness that two generations of valor from American military personnel could never truly upgrade or burnish.

And yet official DC, which means the city’s elite national political press was deeply bought in. This doesn’t mean they were warmongers or rah-rah militarists. They were seldom the biggest cheerleaders for invasions and the organizations they work for often produced some of the deepest critiques or exposes of the failures and shortcomings of these efforts. But they were deeply bought in in ways that are likely best seen in sociological terms. Countless numbers embedded with US military formations. They accompanied members of Congress on ‘CODELS’ to the warzones. They’ve spent time immersed with a Pentagon which has spent two decades building hammers to hit nails in the Middle East and Central Asia. Their peers study and write in the world of DC think tanks focused on the best ways of striking those nails. Wrapping this altogether they have built relationships with America’s local allies, particularly the more cosmopolitan and liberal city dwellers who aspire to a future more like the one Americans take for granted in North America and Europe.

We hear about the very real and dire fate of women and young girls under the Taliban, robbed of futures, banished from public life. And yet when these realities are adduced as the justification for continued or expanded military occupations we must also see that they are both very real and also the latter day cant of empire, much like the way the British East India Company justified its rule of the subcontinent by banning practices like the suttee, the immolation of wives on their husband’s funeral pyres. [my emphasis]

Everyone can make their own assessment on whether he's being too generous in saying, "This doesn’t mean they were warmongers or rah-rah militarists." (Maybe they were "only" patsies for warmongers and militarists?) But he makes an important point.

And he generously notes, "It is harrowing to process years or decades of denial in hours or days." Avoiding the denial in the first place has its advantages.

But after bending over backwards for several paragraphs to be understanding, he finally unloads:

What we see in so many reactions, claims of disgrace and betrayal are no more than people who have been deeply bought into these endeavors suddenly forced to confront how much of it was simply an illusion. ‘There had to have been a better way’ is no more than monumental deflection, whatever mistakes or poor planning were involved. Nowhere has this been more blindingly clear than in the Capital’s news-driving email newsletters and the eager voices of the same folks on Twitter, ramping themselves up into escalating paroxysms of outrage and doom casting over the ugly scenes emerging on viral videos all the while overlooking their support for the policies that made the events inevitable. The intensity of the reaction, the need to stay tethered to the imagery of Sunday and Monday, is a perfect measure of the shock of being forced to confront the reality of the situation in real time.

Some additional useful pieces:

• Anatol Lieven, What Pakistan Stands to Gain From the Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan Time 08/18/2021
• Simon Jenkins, The west’s nation-building fantasy is to blame for the mess in Afghanistan Guardian 08/20/2021
• Marina Ottoway and Anatol Lieven, Rebuilding Afghanistan: Fantasy versus Reality Carnegie Endowment 01/03/2002

The key thing at the moment is that Biden is in the right forest - getting the US out of Afghanistan - so whether he identifies each tree precisely has much less practical importance.  But I do think the US press has a couple of other big problems in reporting on this, aside from the chronic "if it bleeds, it leads" issue that of course dramatic and sensational moments get prominent coverage.

One is their obsession with the political "horserace" combined with the Both Sides Do It mentality that leads to coverage like One Side says COVID is a deadly and highly contagious disease, the Other Side says it's all a big ole plot by George Soros and Bill Gates, and how are we supposed to tell the difference, we're just reporting the facts of what Both Sides say.

The "credibility" trope has played a huge role in bad US foreign policy decisions for decades. Is any national leader nutty enough to think that the US pulling out of Afghanistan after 20 years means that Mexico and Colombia are now going to mount a joint invasion to seize Florida because they think the US won't fight for its own vital interests? (Although, given the current Governor of Florida, a joint Mexican-Colombian occupation government would probably do a better job dealing with COVID!)

Special Inspector General report on the sad state of the now-disappeared government of Afghanistan

I've seen some griping here and there about people pointing out that the Afghan army wasn't fighting, responding that many Afghan soldiers fought and died over the last 20 years.

Here's the thing. The Afghan government collapsed. That also meant the security forces stopped fighting for the government that was collapsing like a house of cards. It's a sensible speculation that there may have been some agreements by the now-defunct government or local commanders with the Taliban to surrender areas to them during the last days of the war.

The Afghan Security Forces were never what the US and Afghan governments pretended they were. Recognizing that reality is no commentary on the personal courage and patriotism of the Afghan soldiers who did fight. Their side lost. It's over. The Taliban governs the place now, although "governing" Afghanistan was a huge challenge for them the last time around, too.

This study just released from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) spells out how badly the US effort to stand up the Afghan government has gone. For the last two decades. It was still going on the assumption that the old government would still be in place for a while.

Pick a page at random and see what you find. Here's something from p. 41:

Although U.S. agencies have claimed some successes through conditionality, such as improving Afghan reporting and procedures, overall these efforts have failed because they lacked credibility. Nothing has been as important to U.S. officials as the survival and stability of the Afghan government, so reforms such as reducing corruption were often secondary. When U.S. officials imposed conditions on aid to incentivize reform, Afghan officials essentially called their bluff, knowing the U.S. government ultimately would not withhold critical assistance that Kabul desperately needed to ensure its survival. Conditions were announced, but not enforced.

For example, there do not appear to be any direct financial consequences to the Afghan government for violating the terms set by the latest mutual accountability framework, the 2020 Afghan partnership framework, which included commitments to democracy and full gender equality. If Afghanistan’s strategic importance to the United States decreases after U.S. troops are withdrawn, however, donor-imposed conditionality may become more credible. In fact, if the U.S. grows more willing to enforce them, the conditions tied to its reconstruction funding could become one of the primary means through which it exerts influence in the country. [my emphasis]

If you haven't read the latest report from the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, you probably shouldn't be writing anything about the situation there. A thorough, sober, and damning assessment of what went wrong. https://t.co/quskbNKMhY

— Stephen Walt (@stephenWalt) August 17, 2021

End of the Afghanistan War brings "shock-and-awe" to some pundits and politicians

There is a lot of good analysis on the fall of the government in Afghanistan, not least because there are so many well-informed and politically engaged people who have been following the story of the war since 2001. My former Congresswoman Barbara Lee, for instance:

What’s happening in Afghanistan currently is a humanitarian crisis.

Let’s be clear: there has never been, and will never be, a U.S. military solution in Afghanistan.

Our top priority must be providing humanitarian aid & resettlement to Afghan refugees, women, and children. pic.twitter.com/DImw4Dc7Ns

— Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) August 16, 2021

Gene Lyons had this irascible but well-informed take on Facebook 08/15/2021:

Way back at the beginning of time, I observed to my wife that Russians invading Afghanistan would end up "sorry they ever heard of that place." My skepticism was based on two things: reading Kipling's novel "Kim" about the British experience there, and talking with a knowledgeable friend who explained that there was no such country as Afghanistan, but eight or ten tribal regions more or less permanently in conflict with all the others. Pretending that a centralized government in Kabul could govern the region, as Paris governs France or Tokyo governs Japan was an illusion.

It follows that any analysis that treats the territory we call "Afghanistan" as a nation state begins and ends in folly. So of course the make-believe nation's army fell apart. It was never very much more than a jobs program; a massive boondoggle for people with the right connections to the fake national government. From the G.W. Bush administration onward, the Pentagon has played let's pretend and American politicians have played along.

Anatol Lieven, who has been reporting on and researching Afghanistan and Pakistan since the 1980s, published an article a few weeks ago that sketches the long history of the governance problem in Afghanistan. He gives decent attention to the Pakistan factor, which has always been huge in the US war. On p. 29-30 of that article, he speculated that after the US withdrew:

...the collapse of the Afghan state in the Pashtun areas may at some point happen not just very quickly, but also quite peacefully, as Pashtun soldiers and police simply go home, while their commanders flee or make their own deals with the Taliban. This, after all, is very much what happened both when the communist state collapsed in 1992 and the mujahideen took over, and as the Taliban swept through the Pashtun areas in 1994–96 and displaced the mujahideen warlords. (An Afghan Tragedy: The Pashtuns, the Taliban and the State Survival 63:3 2021)

Kevin Drum (In hindsight, suddenly everyone knows why the Afghan army collapsed 08/14/2021) points to the long-standing weakness of the US position in Afghanistan, which in some notable ways parallels the bad assumptions made in the Vietnam War:

Let's round this all up:

• Hubristic nation building.
• Starry-eyed constitution writing.
• Wildly unrealistic military training.
• Vast corruption.
• Lack of food and weapons for Afghan soldiers.
• Bad negotiating from the Trump administration.
• Afghan leadership void.

I'm glad everyone is finally able to admit this now that the war is over, but it sure sounds like it's been common knowledge for at least a decade. This is why I think it's folly to suggest that things would have been any different if we'd waited another six months before withdrawing.

There's no question that the US policy class has a lot to answer for here, but the bulk of the blame has to be placed on the army. They were the ones on the ground. They were the ones who built an Afghan military that was completely unsuitable to the country. They're the ones who apparently never grasped the full extent of the corruption they were up against. They were the ones who advised four different US presidents that things were going well if they could just have a little more time and a few more troops. [my emphasis]

Our bipartisan reverence and ritual adulation of the military and its generals is one of the unhealthiest aspects of American democracy. Not that Presidents and Members of Congress can escape blame. But the specific military aspects of the failure - poor training of the Afghan Army, the Pentagon's public misrepresentation of the actual situation - need to be widely examined, too. The same problems were to be seen in Iraq, like deficient training. But the training isn't just a technical problem. In Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the training of the national armed forces emphasized fighting with close-air support from the Americans. When the American air support goes away, the national army has a severe disadvantage.

As Juan Cole recently noted, "The US was massively bombing the country [Afghanistan] every year, the only reason that it was still able to be there. ... There was no mission. There was a morass of corruption and incompetence." (The Great Washington Ponzi Scheme in Afghanistan comes Crashing Down Informed Comment 08/13/2021.

Cole's Informed Comment site has consistently been an excellent source for analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He writes about the Top 6 International Winners and Losers from Taliban Reassertion in Afghanistan 08/16/2021. His list of winners: Iran, Pakistan, and (potentially) Russis. The losers: India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and, of course, the US. (That's actualy seven, but whatever.) For the US, he writes:

The U.S. looks like a clear loser, especially the Biden administration, which has egg on its face from the rapid collapse of the Afghanistan government and military. There are fears that the Taliban victory will embolden the fringe of Muslim radicals. On the other hand, the U.S. did not suffer appreciably from the fall of South Vietnam to the communists in 1975

Josh Marshall comments on the dazed political reactions of the moment in After Sunday It’s Even More Clear Biden Was Right TPM 08/15/2021:

It is crystal clear that the Afghan national army and really the Afghan state was an illusion. It could not survive first contact with a post-US military reality. As is so often the case in life – with bad investments, bad relationships – what we were doing there was staying to delay our reckoning with the consequences of the reality of the situation.

That’s a bad idea.

But as I’ve said in other posts over the last two days, we knew this part. What has been deeply revealing to me is the American response. And here I mean to say the most prominent media and political voices. It’s true this is quicker than I’d figured – not that I’d given the precise timing a lot of thought. And it seems to be quicker than the White House figured. But by a month? Three months? Does that matter? I don’t see why. If anything, given the outcome, quicker is better – since a protracted fall is necessarily a bloodier fall. But what the reaction has demonstrated to me is the sheer depth of denial. The inability to accept the reality of the situation. And thus the excuse making. Sen. Maggie Hassan’s press release below is a painfully good example of that. So is this article by in The Atlantic by George Packer. Virtually everything Richard Engel has been writing on Twitter for the last 24 hours. All so much the cant of empire. But more than this, far more important than this, simply unwise. [my emphasis]

Über-Realist Stephen Walt sounds irritated over some of the hand-writing from the foreign policy "blob," as he sometimes calls it:

What it may have damaged is confidence in US foreign policy judgment and competence, but that process began a long time ago.

— Stephen Walt (@stephenWalt) August 16, 2021

Quincy Institute President Andrew Bacevich in a QI press release (Reflections on the Events of the Past Week in Afghanistan 08/16/2021):

It’s striking that it took more than two years after the U.S. military withdrawal from Vietnam for Saigon to fall, whereas Kabul has fallen to the Taliban before the United States even completes its drawdown. Suffice it to say that the U.S. military has not gotten any better at the project of nation building over the past nearly fifty years. ... We can only hope now that the spectacular failure the last 20 years has wrought will compel a national reckoning with the profound limitations and liabilities of the use of U.S. military force abroad. [my emphasis]

The end of the Afghanistan War - or at least the impending end of the current Afghan government

Juan Cole reflects on the now admitted failure of the US effort in Afghanistan - de facto admission, at least - in The Great Washington Ponzi Scheme in Afghanistan comes Crashing Down Informed Comment 08/13/2021.

It was entirely sensible and necessary for the US to militarily go after al-Qaeda's base in Afghanistan. But Dick Cheney's Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld didn't focus on that. Philip Smucker provided solid reporting on that failure in his 2004 book, Al Qaeda's Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror’s Trail.

The "neoconservative" foreign policy outlook dominant in the Republican Party and in the Cheney-Bush Administration in 2001 was the militarized vision notoriously elaborated by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Key to that assumption was the idea that international terrorism was primarily a matter of state-sponsored terrorism. Part of the attraction of that claim was that PNAC was especially focused on having the US invade Iraq. Jim Lobe wrote about this obsession in Key Officials Used 9/11 As Pretext for Iraq War Inter Press Service 07/15/2003

In Afghanistan, this meant that Cheney and Rummy (Rumsfeld) always saw the Afghanistan War as a necessary sideshow to invade Iraq. It also meant that the military effort in Afghanistan was not focused on targeting al-Qaeda units but on changing the regime in Kabul. At that time, the Pashtun-dominated Taliban of the time controlled the national government and was being opposed by a coalition of other groups under the umbrella of the Northern Alliance.

Cole explains the early moves in the war:

The initial US military action against the Taliban government of Mulla Omar in fall, 2001, was based on the refusal of Kabul to hand over Usama Bin Laden and other al-Qaeda terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks. There is no reason to believe that the Taliban leadership was aware of what al-Qaeda was planning. The Taliban are Pushtuns, al-Qaeda was Arab expatriates. Pushtuns were known to get sick and tired of the Arabs lording it over them and occasionally to stick a shiv between their ribs on the march.

Al-Qaeda was not, however, just a “guest” of the Taliban. It was their 55th Brigade. The al-Qaeda fighters were the best in the country and were the only ones who could take on the Northern Alliance remnants in the country’s northeast with any success. Mulla Omar would never have turned them over to the US. For one thing, he needed them at the home front. But not only the Taliban but many in al-Qaeda felt deeply betrayed by Bin Laden’s use of their hospitality to stage a brazen attack on a superpower, bringing the full weight of the international community down on them.

The US gave the Northern Alliance (fundamentalist Sunni Tajiks, Shiite Hazaras and secular Uzbeks) air support, and enabled them to roll up the Taliban in city after city by taking out the few military vehicles the Taliban had. All the forces were poorly equipped. The Northern Alliance forces took Mazar-i Sharif on horseback, with US special operations guys in tow, painting lasers on Taliban targets for the airstrikes. Some of the spec ops guys didn’t know how to post when riding and boy were they sore the next day. [my emphasis]

The US effort in Afghanistan was never the great humanitarian war of liberation the Cheney Administration pretended. As Cole notes, "The US lost Afghanistan in part by trying to occupy it militarily. In 2005 US troops used flamethrowers to burn poppy crops of Afghan farmers, who had nothing else to live on. One in 7 as a result had to sell a daughter. I doubt they have forgiven the US."

Britain's colonial wars in Afghanistan were exceptionally ugly. So were the Russian and US versions. Cole gives a good brief description of how that worked for the US in Afghanistan. Among other things:

The US was massively bombing the country every year, the only reason that it was still able to be there. ... There was no mission. There was a morass of corruption and incompetence. Many of the regional warlords under the new government were not easier on women or minorities than the Taliban had been, and were fundamentalists of a different stripe.

And the same kind of corruption problem that characterized the US effort in Vietnam appeared in Afghanistan, as well:

Sadly, events like the one Cole describes here are chronic features of such interventions: The Afghanistan National Army had trouble keeping recruits. There was extremely high turnover as soldiers deserted after a few months. Many of those who remained had poor morale and allegedly smoked a lot of pot. The US was sometimes not very serious about training them. It farmed out rifle practice to a private firm that could not improve their accuracy when firing US rifles. It turns out that you have to use the sight, and the firm wasn’t teaching the troops that.

One major factor that has been too little discussed the last 20 years in the US is the fact that Pakistan and India, both nuclear powers, have a long-standing dispute over the Muslim-majority Indian province of Kashmir. Pakistan was always an ally of the Afghan Taliban. We see some grumping about that fact in the reports on the US withdrawal. But it's rarely discussed that Pakistan regards the current pro-American government in Kabul as pro-Indian. And Pakistan sees Afghanistan as a necessary fallback area in a possible war with India. Their perceived interest in having a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul has been a major factor in this situation for longer than the last 20 years.

Aljazeera reports on this factor in Pakistan useful for US only to clean up Afghanistan ‘mess’: Khan 08/12/2021:

The US will pull out its military by August 31, 20 years after toppling the Taliban government in 2001. But as the US leaves, the Taliban today controls more territory than at any point since then.

Kabul and several Western governments say Pakistan’s support for the armed group allowed it to weather the war.

The charge of supporting the Taliban despite being a US ally has long been a sore point between Washington and Islamabad. Pakistan denies supporting the Taliban.

[Pakistani Prime Minister Imran] Khan said Islamabad was not taking sides in Afghanistan.

“I think that the Americans have decided that India is their strategic partner now, and I think that’s why there’s a different way of treating Pakistan now,” Khan said. [my emphasis]

One thing the US and other countries could do to change that situation would be a serious push for a permanent agreement over Kashmir. That would also be something positive in the eyes of much of the Muslim world for the US to undertake. But that's not as easy as moaning and groaning about how the US and NATO didn't pull out some magical military victory after 20 years but providing no feasible alternative approach that could produce a different outcome.

Trying to make sense of the politics of US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan

Andrew J. Bacevich and Adam Weinstein look at the Afghanistan withdrawal discussion in Trump demands Afghan withdrawal and Washington panics. But it’s time to leave, now. Responsible Statecraft 11/17/2020. They give a grim summary of what the US has achieved in 19 years of warfare there:

The legacy of the war in Afghanistan for Americans and for Afghans is somewhere between dismal and horrifying. Over 2,300 U.S. military personnel and at least 65,000 Afghan soldiers and police have been killed. As of 2019, the death toll for Afghan civilians was approximately 43,074 and 2020 is on track to add 3,000 more. From 2001 to 2015, there were 833 major limb amputations of U.S. military personnel serving in Afghanistan. Suicide rates among modern veterans is nothing short of a public health emergency. Despite this massive sacrifice, around 40 percent of Afghan territory remains contested or completely under Taliban control. The 2014 presidential election was contested and required U.S.-led and U.N.-backed mediation that only put a temporary bandage on a deeply dysfunctional system. The 2019 elections again required a political settlement negotiated behind closed doors. Corruption is so endemic in the Afghan government that the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found $19 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse in the last decade alone. Afghanistan remains the world’s number one producer of opium which is turned into heroin. [my emphasis]

And they take note of the defects of the proposed withdrawal:

Granted, the Trump administration’s withdrawal plan is less a plan than an aspiration. The logistical challenges in pulling out the remainder of U.S. forces by year’s end are daunting. But the only alternative offered by critics is to indefinitely hold our troops hostage to the outcome of a “peace agreement” that Washington cannot control. This replaces the unattainable objective of militarily defeating the Taliban with an equally evasive goal of a perfect peace deal in a country with complex ethnic, religious, and tribal cleavages. It is a prescription for remaining in Afghanistan forever. [my emphasis]

And they call attention to the result of one of the worst foreign policy decisions of the Obama-Biden Administration, the "surge" in Afghanistan:

[T]he Obama administration’s three-year long surge which saw as many as 100,000 U.S. troops deployed to Afghanistan, leaving 1,044 killed in action, 13,622 injured, and 8,693 Afghan civilians killed in the crossfire. A web of forward operating bases and combat outposts created the illusion of coalition control over large swaths of Afghanistan, but as soon the surge ended, the Taliban took back these gains. The obvious question is: When is enough, enough? [my emphasis]

Their bottom-line opinion on Trump withdrawing troops from Afghanistan before the Secret Service have to escort him out of the Oval Office? "If Trump succeeds in ending this particular 'endless war,' he will be doing Biden a favor." 

Sam Seder and the crew of The Majority Report react to a painfully superficial CNN discussion of the Afghanistan troop withdrawal issue in CNN Panelists Break Brains Trying To Figure Out Trump Troop Withdrawal 11/19/2020:

It's worth keeping in mind the Pakistan-India factor in this. Pakistan and India are rivals and both have nuclear weapons. The biggest point of dispute is the Muslim-majority Indian state of Kashmir, which Pakistan also claims. As long as the two countries disagree on the status of Kashmir, Pakistan wants to hold Pakistan as an ally to provide strategic depth in a potential conflict with India. The Taliban is viewed by Pakistan as an ally, the Afghan government as pro-India. One of many political complications in Afghanistan.

It was a huge missed in the immediate post-9/11 era that the US didn't undertake a major diplomatic push to get a major agreement between Pakistan and India over Kashmir. It would have been very helpful for the image of the US and the West more generally in the Muslim world. And it would have made stability in Afghanistan a more likely prospect.

But Bush and Cheney decided to invade Iraq instead. With results that are well known.

Russia, bounties, and US-Russia relations

John Kenneth Galbraith described the differences of the Democrats during the 1950s of the Cold War with that of Eisenhower's strikingly hawkish Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who tended toward a binary and moralistic view of the US-Soviet antagonism:

The nineteen-fifties in Washington were the years not of Eisenhower but of Dulles. The idea of the irrepressible conflict went virtually unchallenged. The questioning to which, in a democratic society, every important action of the state should be subject was almost completely in abeyance. I saw this, in a minor way, at first hand. I was cochairman with Dean Acheson in the latter fifties of one of the subsidiary organs of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Advisory Council. Acheson was chairman for foreign policy, I for domestic policy. The Council was, by common agreement, the most liberal wing of the opposition - the leading edge. At our meetings Acheson attacked Dulles lucidly, brilliantly and with resourceful invective for being too soft on the Soviets. The debate on his draft foreign policy resolutions consisted almost exclusively of efforts - by Adlai Stevenson, Averell Harriman, Herbert Lehman and other moderate members - to tone down his declarations of war. That was the opposition to Dulles. (The Age of Uncertainty, 1977;my emphasis)

Later in the 1950s, the Democrats criticized Eisenhower and the Republicans for a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union, which turned out to be nonexistent. And they criticized him for military budgets that were too low. This was another sign of how broad the Cold War consensus was in the US. But I don't want to encourage Ike's overblown reputation as a critic of the military-industrial complex, though we certainly owe the popularity of the phrase to him. Eisenhower's nuclear strategy involved not only the encouragement of a nuclear arms race but relied on a highly risky "tripwire/massive retaliation" strategy to deter Soviet conventional military aggression in Europe. And, wrong though the missile-gap fear turned out to be, it wasn't entirely a fraud. Mistakes do happen, which is why good judgement and critical thinking are even more necessary in military affairs than in other areas.

All of which we should keep in mind when we see stories like that from Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz, Russia secretly offered Afghan militants bounties to kill U.S. troops, intelligence says NYT/Chicago Tribune 06/26/2020. They report:

Both American and Afghan officials have previously accused Russia of providing small arms and other support to the Taliban that amounts to destabilizing activity, although Russian government officials have dismissed such claims as “idle gossip” and baseless.

“We share some interests with Russia in Afghanistan, and clearly they’re acting to undermine our interests as well,” Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., commander of American forces in Afghanistan at the time, said in a 2018 interview with the BBC.

Though coalition troops suffered a spate of combat casualties last summer and early fall, only a few have since been killed. Four Americans were killed in combat in early 2020, but the Taliban have not attacked U.S. positions since a February agreement.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats couldn't resist taking a shot at Bunker Boy over his fondness for Putin on the back of this story. And, of course, it's perfectly legitimate and necessary for the opposition and the Congress to demand to know what the Presidential tough guy who blusters bravely about "America First" down there in the bunker is doing about it.

Here's Biden's take, Joe Biden Responds To Report Of Russian Bounties On U.S. Troops NBC News:

Frank Schaeffer, a former Christian Rightist long since turned liberal and effective critic of his former movement, used the news to indulge in a bit of Manicheanism:

Trump's "entire presidency has been a gift to Putin" says Joe Biden. We now know that this is truer than we ever could have imagined. What other US president remained silent and inactive in the face of evidence of a bounty being placed on our troops resulting in multiple murders?

— Frank Schaeffer (@Frank_Schaeffer) June 28, 2020

(Schaeffer even retweeted something from the very dubious Palmer Report.)

I won't get into how the Democrats clumsily and largely ineffectually used the "Russiagate" thing here, except to say that it hasn't done an awful lot to promote a realistic view of Russia's status in the present-day world.

It's a petrostate, people. An oligarchic, authoritarian petrostate that is an important regional power with a roughly equivalent nuclear arsenal to that of the United States. It's also physically the largest country in the world. It has a capitalist economy with major problems - including its petrostate status. Depending on exchange rates of the moment, its GDP is similar to that of Italy, the third largest economy in the EU: Its military is about the size of Germany's and France combined. It shares a border with its long-term rival China, with which it currently has good relations. On its western border, it is militarily strained by its annexation of Crimea and its support of separatist splinter republics in Ukraine and Georgia. It's a significant regional power that is already heavily extended in its foreign policy.

Those are defining parameters for Russia's action in the world. Due to the critical need for the US to work with Russia to reduce nuclear arms proliferation and on climate change. The US and Europe have to work with Russia in managing their positions on in relations to China's ascendant one in world politics. In other words, a realistic and effective US foreign policy with Russia can't be based on some Good-vs-Evil dichotomy.

Continuing with the Charlie Savage et al report:

Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the U.S. military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries, as they advanced on an American outpost. Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in Afghanistan. But the motivation remains murky.

The officials briefed on the matter said the government had assessed the operation to be the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known widely as the GRU. The unit is linked to the March 2018 nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury, England, of Sergei Skripal, a former GRU officer who had worked for British intelligence and then defected, and his daughter.

Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and assassination. In addition to the 2018 poisoning, the unit was behind an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the poisoning of an arms manufacturer in Bulgaria a year earlier.

American intelligence officials say the GRU was at the center of Moscow’s covert efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In the months before that election, American officials say, two GRU cyberunits, known as 26165 and 74455, hacked into Democratic Party servers, and then used WikiLeaks to publish embarrassing internal communications. [my emphasis]

I certainly don't have any magical formulas for US-Russia relations. Neither does anyone else, which is the point. But it's worth remembering that the Soviet Union and China were both willing and able to make major, substantial diplomatic agreements with the United States while they were actively supporting the Vietnamese Communists in a serious shooting war with US troops who were backing South Vietnam. Russia isn't nearly the world power the USSR was. But it is big and significant enough that the US will continue to have notable conflicts and areas of cooperation simultaneously.

Also, Russia trying to tie the US down in a war in Afghanistan? Where could they ever have gotten the idea to try that? Juan Cole makes an important relevant point, "it isn’t clear that Russia wants the US out of Afghanistan. In fact, when President Obama was preparing to pull out early in his second term, Russian president Vladimir Putin pleaded with him not to do it." (Trump Likely did Throw US Troops in Afghanistan under the Bus, but Why would the Russians have Targeted Them? Informed Comment 06/28/2020)

Of course, that reading of Russian intentions is certainly compatible with the suggestion in the Times report, "Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in Afghanistan." Cole writes:

Given the Russian line on the dangers of a flimsy US-Taliban peace deal that would leave Afghanistan and Central Asia (Russia’s soft underbelly) vulnerable to renewed Muslim fundamentalist militancy, you might argue that if the GRU did want US troops killed by criminals and terrorists, it was to get American officials’ backs up and change their minds about leaving the country precipitously.

This is also interesting: "Putin is desperately afraid that Afghan heroin will turn Russian youth into zombies and sap national strength." Yeah, Vlad, maybe you want to mount a War on Drugs. Look at what, uh, notable results the US version has had!

New internal reports on the Afghanistan War reported out by the Washington Post

The Washington Post is publishing documents on the Afghanistan War they are calling "The Afghanistan Papers: A secret history of the war" by Craig Whitlock, Leslie Shapiro and Armand Emamdjomeh. A number of the documents are linked in that piece.

This is the Post's video on the report, Exclusive: A secret history of the war in Afghanistan, revealed 12/09/2019:

A podcast is also available, The Afghanistan Papers Washington Post 12/09/2019.

People who have followed critical reporting on the Afghanistan War won't be surprised to find out that the Pentagon and various policymakers lied for 18 years about how things were going in the Afghanistan War. Nor that there was immense waste of lives and money. Nor that the actual mission beyond providing a counterstrike against Bin Laden and Al Qaida after the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon was vague. Nor that it was often unclear even who the enemy was.

Juan Cole is one those not greatly surprised by those things: We didn’t Need the Documents: America’s Trillion $ Failure in the Afghanistan War has been Obvious All Along Informed Comment 12/10/2019.

One should always keep in mind a few things while evaluating reports like these. The Pentagon has a long-standing standard alibi for disastrous outcomes in war, which is that it's the fault of civilians who didn't let them kill enough people for long enough to achieve Success. Another is that civilians did a bad job, unlike the Pentagon, which did everything right and performed brilliantly. And it is a great temptation for US policymakers as well as the Pentagon to leave troops in a country where the US fought a war for a prolonged period of time.

Craig Whitlock provides details on the Post's findings in six articles: Informed Comment

• Part 1: At War with the Truth Washington Post 12/09/2019
• Part 2: Stranded Without a Strategy Washington Post 12/09/2019
• Part 3: Built to Fail Washington Post 12/09/2019
• Part 4: Consumed by corruption
• Part 5: Unguarded nation Washington Post 12/09/2019
• Part 6: Overwhelmed by opium Washington Post 12/09/2019

See also:

Craig Whitlock, Jenn Abelson and Meryl Kornfield, Responses from people featured in The Afghanistan Papers Washington Post 12/09/2019

Peter Beaumont, US lies and deception spelled out in Afghanistan papers' shocking detail Guardian 12/09/2019